A Lost Pet And, Alas, A Lost Cause

``When the Cat's Away'' uses the pretext of a lost pet to take a sometimes felicitous, sometimes tiresome trek through a changing Paris neighborhood, in what ultimately amounts to a shaggy-dog story.

Artfully shot and brimming with slices of street life, this modest little film by the New York University- trained Cedric Klapisch almost immediately succumbs to the hazards of its free-form games. Ostensibly concerned with a life crisis of the 20-something makeup artist Chloe, played with wide-eyed, watchful innocence by slender Garance Clavel, it too often feels like a technically proficient but unduly prolonged student film about the resiliency of great cities and their ever-so-colorful people.

Klapisch quickly strings together the slender plot line for his exploration of a neighborhood undergoing wanton destruction, mass evictions and chi-chi gentrification. Chloe, who paints the faces of models at a fashion photography studio, is about to take her first vacation in three years, and needs someone to care for her beloved black cat (with one small white marking), Gris- Gris, which translates as Gray- Gray.

Her gay roommate, Michel, hiply acted by impish Olivier Py, has just thrown out his boyfriend and cannot be bothered tending to a cat. Chloe has few other friends in the quartier to ask for help -- a theme as it turns out. But she ultimately discovers a godsend, a tiny, orange- haired, scratchy-throated old woman who keeps her apartment filled with cats, including a favorite called Rambo. Renee Le Calm's feisty, opinionated Madame Renee welcomes Gris-Gris into her menagerie.

Eager to remain in the neighborhood for as much time as possible, Klapisch does not even bother to deliver a brief montage of Chloe's vacation. He contents himself with one quick shot of her dunking herself in the sea. In the next shot she is back home, laden with junk, and a second later she arrives, unloaded, at Madame Renee's doorstep to hear the bad news that sets ``When the Cat's Away'' in motion: Gris- Gris is missing.

Klapisch has now positioned himself to send Benoit Delhomme, his director of photography, schlepping about the arrondissement. In this moment of distress, Chloe finds comrades in arms. The guilt-stricken Madame Renee recruits a network of cat-loving old ladies from near and far. More active in the pursuit of the lost animal is a sweet, brave but dimwitted North African named Jamel, who becomes the film's most arresting character as played by sad-visaged Zinedine Soualem with unrequited yearning for Chloe.

Sometimes assisted by Michel, Jamel and Chloe paper the neighborhood with handbills. At this point, Klapisch insinuates one of his arguments by training his camera on a magnificent old turret already half wrecked by a fiendish crane of progress. There goes the neighborhood.

The efforts to find Gris-Gris bear no fruit. So ``When the Cat's Away'' now takes up the matter of what is missing in Chloe's life: a man of her own. Putting herself into a fetching frock (chosen by Michel) for a night at the clubs nearly gets her raped. Other attempts at social intercourse prove disappointing. At last, our heroine becomes Chloe in the afternoon, with a macho young drummer.

Through it all, Chloe also learns something about the place she has paid so little attention to. The loss of Gris-Gris gains her friends, even a boyfriend. To find a life, you just have to look around -- at least that is how Klapisch sees it.

Rated R, this film contains impolite talk, and glimpses of homosexual and heterosexual encounters.

WHEN THE CAT'S AWAY, directed and written by Cedric Klapisch; director of photography, Benoit Delhomme; edited by Francine Sandberg; produced by Aissa Djabri, Farid Lahouassa and Manuel Munz. A Sony Pictures Classics release of a Coproduction of Vertigo Productions and France 2 Cinema, with the participation of Canal+, opening today in a subtitled French langauge print at Cinema City, Hartford. Running time: 95 minutes.